Today I’m happy to present a guest post from my colleague Andrew Hodgkins. While this post is not specifically about Chinese education and society, it was part of the session in which I presented on the ethics of research in Mainland China. I hope you enjoy his contribution. If you don’t, I hope you’ll take it out on Andrew and not me!

Cheers,Lorin

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I need to get something off my chest: Having recently completed my fieldwork, I was asked to present on research ethics – but quite honestly, I am at a loss for words as to what it means to be ethical. This admission is one of those “lessons learned from the field” – ethics (that little voice inside my head telling me what is right and what is wrong) is not easily articulated – this may relate to the fact that researchers are afraid of admitting that they are all to human and make mistakes. We also tend to be so focused on our narrow research areas that ethics is one of those add-ons associated with a myriad of questions required to be answered “properly” by various gate keeping mechanisms designed to provide higher educational institutions with some level of assurance that they have covered themselves legally before cutting grad students loose into the “field.” As I reflect upon the experience

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Lorin Yochim

I work in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. I specialize in cultural sociology of education (esp. of Mainland China), critical geography, and cultural change.